How quality management needs emergence for engaging the 2030 agenda

“If not now, when?" The UN’s sustainable development goals (SDGs) are gaining increasing attention, and there is wide acknowledgement that the challenges ahead, as well as the solutions needed, are often complex. In contrast, the historical strength of Quality Management (QM) lies in situations when the cause-effect relations can be analysed and understood, when technical expertise can provide the answer, where the application of “best practice” is helpful, and where order is a virtue. When dealing with complexity, leaders who tend to impose this kind of command-and-control style will often fail. Success, rather than this, comes from setting the stage, stepping back a bit, allowing patterns to emerge, curiously tracking what takes place, spreading what was learned, and scaling up success. Such a leadership and practice has been referred to as the fourth and called-for “Emergence Paradigm” of QM. The purpose of this paper is to contribute with knowledge about how the Emergence Paradigm of QM comes into play when persuading organisations and the world to take action on the 2030 Agenda. This paper is conceptual but includes experiences from dialogic action research in an emergent process of 60 Swedish authorities getting into collective action on the 2030 Agenda. As a result, the paper highlights how QM may contribute to realising the 2030 Agenda by dynamically combining the strengths of the past QM paradigrms with new practices and mind sets related to complexity and emergence. It also provides new insights that may help when applying QM to take the bold and transformative steps urgently needed to shift the world onto a sustainable and resilient path.